I bought a copy of the second issue of James Kochalka's Sketchbook Diaries today, and I'll be buying the first issue as soon as I can hunt up a copy.

The premise behind the Sketchbook Diaries is simple—every day, Kochalka draws a four-panel comic loosely detailing something that happened to him. He plays with his cat, he gets drunk, he engages in goofy talk with his wife. It's simple, but immensely pleasing.

I'm not sure why I love diary stuff so much, but I do, and I always have. I used to love the comic strip Jim's Journal, and I'm still interested in diary comics of all sorts, and, really, anything where people just document their days (including weblogs and journal sites).

Simple voyeurism?

Labels: comics

Monday, April 29, 2002
11:31 PM
0 comments

The state of Illinois is suffering a budget shortfall this year.

As a result, the new state budget (to be voted on in June, if I recall correctly) contains serious cuts to higher education.

In response to these cuts, the English Department at the University of Illinois was, well, let's say strongly encouraged to cut a bunch of lecturers. About half of them (twenty-five or so) went. I've stayed on, although many people who I like and respect will not be returning.

This upcoming fall, UIC will have a record number of incoming freshmen. The lecturers traditionally teach a huge percentage of the University's freshman composition courses. (By my conservative calculations, those twenty-five lecturers were responsible for the education of about 1,500 students per semester.)

To cover for the lack of lecturers, UIC has had to cancel various classes and programs, eroding the undergraduate experience significantly. This article, from the UIC school paper, deals with some of the particulars. (A Chicago Tribune article is allegedly in the works.)

I anticipate a scene of grim chaos in the fall.

Labels: academia, teaching

Wednesday, April 24, 2002
2:25 PM
0 comments

The comments are now working.

The given-up-on-in-disgust Imaginary Year entry made it online last night. (The first two paragraphs were written in yesterday's depressed state; I think their tone reveals that pretty well.)

And my one-new-recipe-a-week plan, which got derailed when the semester started to get busy, just got a serious jump-start, because today's mail brought me a handmade cookbook, full of witty asides and cartoons, which kicks a truly unspeakable amount of ass.

Labels: personal

Tuesday, April 23, 2002
5:51 PM
0 comments

Comments still not working. My hosting service has been notified; we'll see how long it takes them to get back to me.

Yesterday, after I failed to get them working, I crawled back into bed, and stayed there until about 5 pm. I didn't get dressed or leave the house all day.

Today I continue to feel completely unproductive. I spent maybe an hour or two trying to write the Imaginary Year update before giving up in disgust.

This seems to happen to me all the time: I soldier on through periods where I'm intensely busy and stressed, just trying to hold on until I have an expanse of free time to call my own, only then when I get the free time I don't put it to any kind of use. Last week I was grading tons of papers, meeting with students in conferences, worrying about keeping my job, and I still managed to get the Number None CD put together. This weekend I found myself between batches of papers, with the CD done, and the job worries at rest—suddenly I had free time, and I found myself mainly just sitting around, utterly uninspired.

Am I just simply experiencing a period of creative / physical / emotional exhaustion? And using the free time, perhaps sensibly, as time to rest up? The funny thing is that these periods of idleness don't really help me to feel rested: when I'm unproductive I worry about it. The lack of interest in working on my own personal projects—or in fact in engaging with the world at all—seems to border on depression, and then I worry both about feeling idle and about feeling depressed.

I doubt that feeling worried about feeling depressed is of any use at all. It seems like it would be better to just let yourself feel depressed, riding it out instead of fighting it. I suspect that I shouldn't worry about the idleness, either—it probably is a necessary "resting up," and the anxiety about it may be a key cause of the depression-like symptoms.

Other people let themselves take time off, and they spend that time just sitting around doing nothing, and they don't spend the whole time worrying about it. I think?

I have to admit that the idea seems alien to me.

Labels: mental_illness, personal

Monday, April 22, 2002
12:18 PM
0 comments

So I've been trying to install Aaron Chan's CGIcomments on this weblog. This should be feasible: the hosting service that I use for this site seems able to run CGI scripts.

I don't know much UNIX, and I didn't have a secure shell client until today. But I used this tutorial to walk pretty closely through the various steps. Unfortunately, I'm still getting "Internal Server Errors" when I try those comment links, and I even get them when I try to run the simple test script I uploaded.

Which leads me to believe that there's something very simple that I'm doing wrong. Raymond's tutorial suggests that I might need to configure the Apache server to run CGI scripts. But can that possibly be an issue, given that my host offers full CGI ability even to people with basic dial-up accounts like myself?

I'd love insight from any of you folks out there who have more computer knowledge than I.

Labels: meta

Sunday, April 21, 2002
1:08 PM
0 comments

Tonight I'm going to see Goem, a loop-manipulation band from the Netherlands.

The Incursion Music Review currently has up a profile of the band.

"Basically Goem has no structure — or it's a very short structure: it's one loop which we repeat repeat repeat... But still we are always looking for this tension in the track. There has to be tension. If the tension is not there, the track is nothing."

Update : stayed in and watched Donnie Darko instead.

Labels: music_commentary

Saturday, April 20, 2002
2:46 PM
0 comments

William Fields links to "Songs in the Key of F12," an article from the "music issue" of Wired.

At first, this article sticks pretty close to the normal journalistic line about laptop music, which, for the record, is usually an ambiguous mix of pros (look at the cool toys!) and cons (it's so boring to watch; for all we know the performer could be checking his e-mail / updating his weblog / playing Minesweeper). But about halfway through, it begins to pick at the tricky question about who is "in control" of this music: the musician, or the algorithims in the software?

This question does not have an easy answer. (It may not even ultimately be a meaningful question.)

I've been talking to people about the music that I make with Number None, and invariably whoever I'm talking to asks "oh, what do you play?" I've taken to answering machines, since most of the sounds I produce for the band are elicited from a computer or an analog synthesizer. And sometimes, I feel less like a musician and more like a technician of some sort—sometimes the machines seem to generate the music on their own, and my role is simply to help that music find its way out into the world.

Or, as Shawn "Twerk" Hatfield says in the article:

"I'm trying to make new sounds, computer sounds. ... I'm never able to get the sounds that I hear in my head ... so I just play with randomness and let these things happen naturally. The networks of sound generation I set up are just spewing out all of this chaos, and from that I pull out the pieces that are worthy. It's like a garden that you're constantly trimming and manicuring."

Labels: creative_process, music_commentary, technology

Friday, April 19, 2002
11:23 PM
0 comments

"We are pleased to offer you an appointment as Lecturer in the UIC English Department for the academic year 2002-2003. Fall semester instruction begins on Monday, August 26, 2002."

Labels: teaching

Thursday, April 18, 2002
10:56 AM
0 comments

Have I mentioned recently that my job is at risk? I'm an adjunct lecturer at UIC, and because of state budget shortfalls, UIC is cutting about half of us. Notices are supposed to be going into people's mailboxes today, so—cliffhanger! Tune in tomorrow to find out what happens.

Until then, here's a website documenting one guy's series of invented instruments.

Labels: academia, personal, teaching

Wednesday, April 17, 2002
3:44 PM
0 comments

OK. I'm going to attempt, over the next few weeks, to get a grip on some of the current trends in electronic literature, in part by reading my way through the index of work presented at the Electronic Literature State of the Art Symposium.

The first grouping that I can clearly identify encompasses short animations, generally designed in Flash, that use the written word as a central component, and have little or no interactive element (beyond possibly clicking "start" or performing some other basic navigational tasks, like scrolling). I'd call these "kinetic poems," except kinetic poems is too broad a designation: for instance, a kinetic poem can be interactive or non-interactive. Since the language-based content is the only thing that significantly distinguishes these from other short experimental web-based films, I'm going to call them language films.

Examples include: Miekal And's SEEDSIGNS for Philadelpho, or The Dreamlife of Letters by Brian Kim Stefans.

Forerunners: concrete poetry, language poetry, experimental film, Sesame Street animation segments.

More to come.

Labels: electronic_literature

Tuesday, April 16, 2002
4:32 PM
0 comments

I really should consider going to this conference on New Media Poetry this fall in Iowa City.

There are often conferences that I'd like to attend, but can't, because of the expense involved in travelling halfway across the country. The most recent one I missed was the Electronic Literature Organization's State of the Art Symposium, out in LA, where I in fact presented work even though I wasn't there.

But Iowa City is closer, just a few hours away by car. Of course, there's still the expense of renting a car for a few days, which is probably about the same as the cost of airline tickets...

Labels: academia, electronic_literature

Monday, April 15, 2002
10:46 AM
0 comments

Recent search terms by which people have found my online serial, Imaginary Year, include:

• hypertext as narrative space
  
• puma monstro
  
• mom i'd like to fuck
  
• yogurt technology
  
• toyo ito
  
• losing your virginity
  
• imaginary poems
  
• cabbagetown and gentrification
  
• gutterpunk chick
  
• attack of the 50 ft woman paper
  
• architecture toyo ito
  
• american spirit cigarettes
  
• bottle fuck
  
• american spirit cigarette
  
• australian survivor theme download
  
• buffy, spike, fuck
  
• corona cervesa
  
• designer vagina
  
• breasts against the glass
  
• downloadable commercials and advertisements about sony
  
• aesthetics of disappearance
  

While this is a reasonably accurate cross-section, I can't help but feel that most of these people were probably disappointed.

Oh God I'm tired.

Labels: lists, meta, personal

Sunday, April 14, 2002
11:37 PM
0 comments

The Number None album is done. We need to put a finishing touch on the packaging and then we'll gift some copies to people. You may already be on the list. More on that later. For now, here's this, from the liner notes to the Mountain Goats' newest album All Hail West Texas:

"Some of us ... imagine the hand of a person behind all this: an ornery little fellow who will have no sound without a second sound to obscure and pollute it, who is deeply mistrusting of singers in general, and who believes that whatever 'signal-to-noise ratio' might mean, it can't be any good unless more value is placed on the latter of the two hyphenated terms. Of course the original signal is never actually anywhere near any recordings anywhere, but you all already knew that. You have been sure of it for quite some time now. You see the proof everywhere. It is the reason you started reading these lines in the first place."

Labels: number_none, personal

Saturday, April 13, 2002
10:54 AM
0 comments

I love this little guy.

Friday, April 12, 2002
12:56 PM
0 comments

Tonight Laura and I are going to head over to Quimby's to see Ben Marcus, author of The Age of Wire and String and the new Notable American Women, which I plan on purchasing tonight.

Ben Marcus' website (thanks Geegaw) is set up like the website of a fictional corporation, Marcus Systems Enterprises, with fits in with what I was saying about "intimate bureaucracies" some time ago.

Like Marcus' other work, the website recycles cultural forms and idioms to portray a world which is new, yet somehow oddly familiar. I'm a big fan of Marcus' project, and I find the website entertaining (dig these crazy tests).

But the model of the corporation that Marcus is scavenging from is slightly out-of-date: all stylized silhouettes, space-age geometric forms, and bureaucratic jargon. Not to say that this isn't all well and good. Marcus frequently appropriates forms which have a vaguely archaic feel to them, and this is a part of what gives his work its strange power. But I'd like to see someone (besides Adbusters and ®^TMark) appropriate the forms of the contemporary corporation, the corporation newly focused on friendliness and hipness.

Think phone-company imagery. A contemporary corporation no longer represents itself as an anonymous, stylized body. It represents itself as a young Asian girl, a female boxer, four Caucasian friends having fun on the town, and an old black man hugging his granddaughter. Always putting forth the message "we are you, whoever you are."

Labels: art, capitalism

Thursday, April 11, 2002
5:12 PM
0 comments

Spent a few days over the weekend hacking out some mockups of cover art for the Number None CD.

It was hard to think of an image that would convey our aesthetic very well. My tendency in design these days is to lean towards the ultra-minimal: super-clean expanses of white space broken up only with stark, perfect geometric forms. You know, the kind of thing that is easy to do well with Adobe Illustrator.

And that would be a decent fit if Chris and I were making minimal, clean laptop music. But we're not.

Which is not to say that we don't use technology. Chris can play some instruments well, but without machines I would have nothing of value to bring to this band. I love using the machines as generative technology: I'll set up a system on the computer, plug a sample into it, and see what emerges. Or I'll "play" the guitar using only the knobs on the effect pedals. But the end result is not clean. The music is dirty—irregular, fecund, low-fidelity. Recorded live to a single microphone which also records the room hiss and traffic noise. The Illustrator look just didn't fit for this project.

But then it occurred to me. The right technology to use for the cover art was the photocopier.

For a long time I've loved photocopiers. (See number 17.) I love the things that are made with them. And it seemed to be fitting to use them for this project: as with the recording technology Chris and I have at our disposal, photocopiers are cheap and lo-fi (the punks knew this first), and, as with the sound manipulation software I use, with photocopiers you can appropriate just about any sort of input, push a few buttons, and be rewarded with often magnificently unpredictable output.

How about links?

Here's a history of Photocopy Art.

Here's some information on Choreography For Copy Machine (Photocopy Cha Cha), a 1991 animated film made entirely from photocopies (I saw it in 1999, and it was wonderful; I wish a Quicktime version existed).

And here's some images from the (somewhat) recent book Fucked Up and Photocopied : Instant Art of the Punk Rock Movement.

Labels: number_none, technology, xerography

Tuesday, April 09, 2002
8:40 PM
0 comments

Weblogs I've been looking at lately which haven't yet been added to the "others" column over there on the left include:

• Baraita (pop culture, fandom, and academia)
  
• William Fields' weblog (sound, technology, and politics)
  
• City of Sound (sound, urban space, and design)
  
• Dear Internet Abyss (art, media, and webculture)
  

Labels: internet, weblogs

Saturday, April 06, 2002
3:09 PM
0 comments

I've been thinking a lot lately about misinformation.

In particular, I've been thinking about misinformation as an aesthetic response to the "information revolution" of the 1990s. Information is now available on nearly any conceivable topic, no matter how obscure, and I don't think that I'm alone in noticing that the end result is a world that feels flattened out somehow.

For a long time now, artists have created new forms of meaning from the raw materials of their culture. I've noticed more and more that contemporary creative types have begun to appropriate the very rhetoric of information as a texture, and are using that texture to create pockets of "non-information," packets of data which make sense by the way that they cancel out useful meaning...

I see something like The Onion as a high-profile example of this trend, although no small percentage of the "meaning" of The Onion derives from its heavy reliance on more-or-less traditional sorts of gags.

Perhaps a better example would be the 100 Lies sequence, currently in progress over at Geegaw.

I have more examples. Stay tuned.

Labels: information

Thursday, April 04, 2002
8:49 PM
0 comments